About Me

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Yikes, haven't posted here since October?! Over the past few months I've been running this Robot Attack! blog for a media class I took. It covered games but mostly focused on robot-related video games.

I've been playing Company of Heroes, World in Conflict, Warhammer 40K, Mario Galaxy, Earth Defense Force 2017, Team Fortress 2, and Rock Band.

Rock Band's such a great game. I highly recommend it to everyone :) Ever since I started playing the game, I've developed a great deal of respect for real drummers, as I can't complete most of the songs on Hard when playing the drums.

One of the weakest aspects of Rock Band is that the songs have pretty crummy vocals. Most of the songs just aren't very good songs to sing. I can't imagine any fans of Karaoke Revolution or Singstar really getting into Rock Band for long. This game is really biased in favor of the guitar and drum players. Most Rock Band players don't seem to mind though, judging by the leaderboard statistics. Because so few people bother to pick up a microphone, I rank around #2,000 on the leaderboards. Meanwhile, my guitar and drummer position is in the #20,000 and #30,000 area! It's not because I'm so good at singing, but simply because no one is interested in singing. Still, I give Rock Band a score of 9/10.

World in Conflict is a fun RTS game, but it seems overrated to me. It scored mostly 90% scores in the press. But the game's rock-paper-scissors mechanic feels too simplistic for me to get into. The biggest strength of the game is the multi-player, where it has a very convenient pick-up-and-play system, similar to what you'd see in FPS games like Call of Duty or Battlefield. You can join a game and leave anytime you want without feeling like you're dooming your teammates by doing so. World in Conflict... 7.5/10.

After enjoying the Cloverfield film, I picked up Earth Defense Force 2017 on Ebay so I could shoot giant monsters rampaging across a city. The graphics are pretty crummy, but they get the job done. It's a simple and fun arcade shooter. Not worth the original $40-50 price tag that it released with, though! Earth Defense Force... 7/10.

Team Fortress 2 is a fun game. It seems to have become really popular, judging by how often I see it mentioned on various game sites and forums. This baffles me, as the game seems almost identical to Team Fortress Classic, which I swear I was playing around 10 years ago. I would've liked much more change to the formula. 7/10

I also played through Mass Effect a couple of times. This game was a disappointment for me. The gameplay, like in most Bioware games, is pretty terrible. The AI is awful, the shooter combat is too simple and less exciting than the Doom and Heretic games of 10 years ago. The story was top-notch and had me playing through the game in marathon sessions until I could complete it, but with poor gameplay, the game has almost no replay value once the dialogue has been fully explored. Mass Effect felt like a high-tech "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, and not an actual game. I give it a 6/10.

Mario Galaxy is almost the opposite of Mass Effect. The game play is fantastic, but has no story at all. It's fun when you're playing it, but without even a basic story to follow and propel me forward, I've had trouble actually wanting to play the game. So it's ironic. The game is far superior to Mass Effect, but without a story, it's hard to appreciate. 7/10.